Why Movies are Better than Books: Advantages of Visual Storytelling

It’s a war that never ends! The civil war between books and movies, and when it comes to literature, people have different preferences. People say that books are better than movies, but is that true? Most argue that books are better because you can imagine them for yourself and have your own creativity and imagination. Movies are fun, and books are thrilling. I think we all know the winner of this battle war.

The Rich Variety and Imagination of Books

Books spark your imagination, and there’s a wider variety to choose from.

There’s science fiction, non-fiction, fantasy; you name it! Books flare your imagination and can give you joy just from reading them. Movies often leave out the more important details and can’t fit everything in a two-hour video. With books, you can have an infinite amount of storytelling time and have lots of those juicy details in them. Sometimes it’s hard to pick up a good book nowadays with all the activities we are doing. Although reading is a good alternative to watching tv or a movie, it takes a long time to read. It also doesn’t help if you’re a slow reader too.

Overall, books are better than movies. Even though it takes a lot of time to read a book, it makes the experience a lot better than watching a movie about the book. Nowadays, people have jobs, kids, and extracurricular activities. I would love to enjoy a good book, but with all the hours of school and work to provide for my parents, I really can’t find one. Hell, I can’t even watch television with all of the activities I have going on lately. Other people in my grade who work can relate to what I’m saying.

Environmental Concerns and Accessibility

A downside to watching movies is the materials it takes to make the movie and the plastic it takes to make the cd. The production crew has to be right, the lighting, props, and pretty much anything you can think of. To mass produce those CDs just like that is just awful for the environment. What it takes to create a book does not consume a lot of resources. One regular size tree can roughly make 65 books.

Reading a book is so much better, too, because you can just take the book anywhere you want. Waiting for a bus, boom, pull out your book and read while you wait. Bored and got nothing to do, bam, just whip out that fat book and start reading away. You can take a book anywhere, unlike a movie, where you have to have the cd, a movie player to play it on, and a TV to watch it on.

Character Portrayal: Book vs. Movie

The bad thing about watching a movie over a book is that you’ll probably get disappointed over how the characters look. In a book, you can picture the character any way you like and have a personal preference, but in a movie, once you see the character in that book you were reading, you’ll be disappointed and not like the character as much as you thought you would. Overall, movies just don’t have that juicy detail you want. You can’t see inside the protagonist’s mind when you’re watching a movie unless they cut the scene and show a clip of what they’re thinking. With a book, you can show all their thoughts, emotions, and judgment with them. The literary professor named Thomas Leitch quotes, “The book will always be better than any adaptation because it is always better at being itself.”

The Power of Film Adaptations

Some plays are often set from books, and they are limited to one place --the stage--so you can’t really picture that book any other way. Films nowadays can do much more than that. You don’t have to stay on one relative plain like a stage, for example. You can move it to any place you want, whether it be from a vast open area, dining area, and even outer space if you film it behind a green screen and edit the hell out of it.

Emotion and Engagement: A Comparative Analysis

Overall, movies are great, but they don’t have the same inclusions that books tend to have. You see, in movies, you really can’t feel the emotion that the character has in the movies like you can with the books. Movies let you observe, but books can hit you with the raw emotion that movies can’t let you have. You can be the hero who saves the princess from a dragon or even be a god/goddess that can influence people or even a king who leads their troops into battle.

A reason why people would choose a movie over a good book is the time it takes to process information. If you’re reading a book about penguins, and it’s nine hundred pages long, chances are you’ll get bored and read the words on the page without actually processing any information, which I tend to do a lot. Instead, you could watch a documentary and watch how these penguins interact with each other, and you’re most likely going to attain the information much better.

Engaging the Audience: Strategies in Both Mediums

An important part of the entertainment industry is ways to attract people to buy their products. Books will have specific details to them that are meant to attract the reader and keep them engaged. Wanting more. The way the movie industry does it is through the trailers that they put out on TV and on billboards. As I stated before, people who both read books and watched movies were overall dissatisfied because of their high expectations. An added benefit to watching movies is the feeling you get when they use music and visual design to enhance the effect of the movie on the audience. The audience might not even notice the subtle music in the background, but they can surely foreshadow what’s going to happen through the music. On the contrary, movies are better shared with friends because of the fact that it’s easier to follow and can be discussed without many complications.

References

1. Rosenblatt, R. (1995). Literature as Exploration. Modern Language Association.
2. Zipes, J. (2007). The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. Routledge.
3. Nell, V. (1988). Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. Yale University Press.
4. Carriere, J.C., & Eco, U. (2010). This is Not the End of the Book. Vintage.

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